The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (338 page)

Even at sixty, esteemed for his longevity and heavy-sighing philosophy, Quinn was treated like the all-purpose actor for diverse exotics: an Arab in
The Message
or
Mohammad Messenger of God
(76, Moostapha Akkad), the title depending upon terrorist pressure; and offering the Aristotelian grin in
The Greek Tycoon
(78, J. Lee Thompson). A sort of esperanto now enfolded him, and he became as vague and as implausible as the United Nations: a Mexican in
The Children of Sanchez
(78, Hall Bartlett), another Arab in
Caravans
(78, James Fargo), a Basque in
The Passage
(78, Thompson).

He played the Libyan guerrilla Omar Mukhtar who opposed Mussolini in
Lion of the Desert
(81, Akkad);
High Risk
(81, Stewart Raffill); he was executive producer of
Circle of Power
(81, Bobby Roth);
The Salamander
(81, Peter Zinner);
The Last Days of Pompeii
(84, Peter Hunt); as the tycoon’s father in
Onassis: The Richest Man in the World
(88, Waris Hussein); not as the sea in a TV
The Old Man and the Sea
(90, Jud Taylor);
Ghosts Can’t Do It
(90, John Derek);
Revenge
(90, Tony Scott);
Only the Lonely
(91, Chris Columbus);
Jungle Fever
(91, Spike Lee); and
Mobsters
(91, Michael Karbeinikoff).

In the midnineties he played Zeus in a TV series devoted to the adventures of Hercules. He was also in
A Star for Two
(91, Jim Kaufman);
Last Action Hero
(93, John McTiernan);
This Can’t Be Love
(94, Anthony Harvey);
Somebody to Love
(94, Alexandre Rockwell);
A Walk in the Clouds
(95, Alfonso Arau);
Seven Servants
(96, Daryush Shokof);
Gotti
(96, Robert Harmon);
Il Sindaco
(96, Ugo Fabrizio Giordani);
Carmino de Santiago
(99, Robert Young);
Avenging Angelo
(01, Martyn Burke).

R

Bob Rafelson
, b. New York, 1933
1968:
Head
. 1970:
Five Easy Pieces
. 1972:
The King of Marvin Gardens
. 1976:
Stay Hungry
. 1981:
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. 1987:
Black Widow
. 1990:
Mountains of the Moon
. 1992:
Man Trouble
. 1994:
Wet
(s). 1996:
Blood and Wine
. 1998:
Poodle Springs
(TV). 2002:
Erotic Tales
(s). 2003:
No Good Deed
.

From Dartmouth College, Rafelson went into the service and, while stationed in Japan, he worked as a radio disc jockey and a consultant to Shochiku, a film company exporting to America. Back in America, he was a story editor for TV. He hovered around the edge of the film industry without finding a role that satisfied his urge for independence. In recompense, in partnership with Bert Schneider, he indulged his love of plastic trash culture by forming the Monkees pop group, promoting, directing, and designing them, and being finally both fascinated and alarmed by his role as puppet master.
Head
is a wild, fragmented fantasy about the life and death of such a group, and it was written by Rafelson and a close friend, Jack Nicholson.

Five Easy Pieces
and
The King of Marvin Gardens
come from the same partnership. They share a rapt attention to intimate, family stories, to people who are fresh and lifelike, and to parts of America that seldom reach the screen. In both, Nicholson plays a vaguely artistic outcast member of a family, disturbed by his failure to be convinced by domesticity or to feel the relationships that attract him. Rafelson was still a little concealed by the hesitant but very appealing presence of Nicholson, and by his own restraint. However, certain characteristics could be picked out: he was a storyteller—much of his personality lay in the unexpected turns of his narratives, the awareness of point of view, and the tender treatment of quirky individuality.

Like the central character in
Marvin Gardens
, Rafelson was a raconteur of vivid, touching events, himself looking on from the dark. And the narration is deeply convincing. Indeed, the sense of actuality is so great that, at this stage, Rafelson seemed like a novelist not much affected by cinematic genres, but quietly intent on describing lives and places he had known. (This is rare in American cinema, where films invariably realize ideas and images imagined by directors. The people in such films, and often the places, are idealized: e.g., the West, the city, the hero, the tart.) His visual style was functional. The sense of caring for people and places was a result of an undemonstrative, watchful camera that only occasionally allowed itself an evidently “beautiful” shot—such as the moment in
Marvin Gardens
when the camera cuts to a high angle to show the herringbone boardwalk promenade of Atlantic City.

The continuity of the two films is very intriguing.
Five Easy Pieces
begins in Texas with Nicholson as an oil-rigger, living with Rayette, a local girl. It is the raw vulgarity of Rayette that makes us realize how out of his element Nicholson is. Not that Rayette is disparaged or patronized. She is treated with exactly the weary compassion and intermittent affection that makes Nicholson endure her. She is pregnant, and Nicholson begins to escape her by going to visit his sick father. This is a characteristic Rafelson enlargement of a situation. For the family is elitist, tucked away in the rural north, intent on its own classical music-making. As we move from sunny plains to gloomy, wooded country, we discover that Nicholson was once a good pianist who fled from the narrow intensity of his family. The father has had a stroke and is inert, and Nicholson has an affair with his brother’s fiancée, a “perfect” creature, rarefied but passionate, before Rayette too comes noisily north. Thus, again, Nicholson flees, on the spur of the moment but chronically, to Alaska, leaving Rayette in a filling station lavatory. The irresponsible behavior does not exclude a clear feeling that Nicholson is touched and perplexed by people.

In
Marvin Gardens
, Nicholson is a radio storyteller—a quiet man who expands over the mike—called away to Atlantic City by his raffish younger brother, a buffoon crook whose work for “Lewis” seems to have brought him within reach of the gambling concession on a Hawaiian island. The brother lives with a wife and his wife’s stepdaughter. The wife is an aging Kewpie doll, more sophisticated than Rayette, but essentially like her; while the stepdaughter is of the same Pre-Raphaelite beauty as the fiancée in
Five Easy Pieces
. Although beautifully drawn and played, this “young wanton” character is perilously contrived—the most rooted in movies, in fact, and there is a weakness (by his own terms) in the way Rafelson succumbs to the charm of such a hippie princess.

That said,
Marvin Gardens
goes further than
Easy Pieces
, into tragedy. The Hawaiian plan is moonshine, an impossible venture that no one can explain away. The brother ditches wife for stepdaughter, and in a superb scene of cross-purpose, the wife is driven in anguish and rebuffed love to kill the brother. Few screen killings have so equated melodrama with the everyday and traced the spasm release of domestic intractability that makes people murderers. Once more, the family has been disproved. Nicholson goes back to Philadelphia with a coffin to the house where he lives with his grandfather, who is watching old home movies of the brothers as kids playing on the shore of Atlantic City where most of the action has taken place.

Marvin Gardens
and
Five Easy Pieces
can easily be seen as metaphors for the creative impulse in America—wanting to speak, yet unconvinced by speech, and torn between art and commerce. The brothers in
Marvin Gardens
are versions of the writer/director and the producer/showman: and the two cancel each other out, as if Rafelson saw family struggle as the root of an eventual, exhausted silence.

The decline in Rafelson may be dated from
The Postman Always Rings Twice:
despite its qualities of mood, loneliness, and sexual desperation, and no matter the force of Nicholson and Lange, there did not seem an overpowering reason for remaking that story. And Rafelson needs to be doing something urgent and even dangerous.
Black Widow
was more plainly, and more disastrously, an attempt at a routine, genre piece. But the plot was confused and a test of our credulity; Theresa Russell was not inventive enough for the killer, and Debra Winger is not a natural heroine.
Mountains of the Moon
is the one film that indulges Rafelson’s own taste for adventurous travel, but its central story collapses because of sketchy writing and awkward playing.
Man Trouble
and
Blood and Wine
were, sadly, the poorest films Rafelson has made.

George Raft
(George Ranft) (1903–80), b. New York
Raft spent his last decades nomadically, often pursued by American tax authorities and turned away by foreign immigration officials. In the early 1960s, Britain refused him entry when he had been set to host a Berkeley Square nightclub. It was said that he had Mafia connections—this in the days before we learned to wonder whose hands pulled all our strings. Hollywood even made
The George Raft Story
(61), a vacuous biopic working so hard to look away from iniquity let alone a rosebud.

It is still hard to decide whether Raft is an honest notoriety or a tame curiosity. Rumors have always suggested that he knew more about the real-life underworld than other Hollywood actors. If so, why could he not portray gangsters with animation? And if he was really an honored friend to Bugsy Siegel, why should he have spent so many years embroiled in such dismal movies? The saddest and most scathing picture of Raft is in Billy Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot
(59) where, as the starch-faced Spats Colombo, he has to watch his own coin-tossing tricks being paraded before him and then suffer an assassin jumping out of a premature birthday cake.

Raft was a bad actor, and worse, an apprehensive one—if he might have been a real gangster, perhaps he held just as insecure a place in the underworld. What a movie it might make: a diffident guy employed in the movies because the studios think he knows Mr. Big, and tolerated by Big so long as he remains a companion of stars. It is a droller story than a bed and a horse’s head.

The legend goes that while providing young muscle in the protection racket Raft was given the small role of “Gigolo” in a Texas Guinan movie,
Queen of the Night Clubs
(29, Bryan Foy), and then another in Rowland Brown’s
Quick Millions
(31). A clutch of gangster parts followed, the best of which were in Roy del Ruth’s
Taxi
(32) and Howard Hawks’s
Scarface
(32). After
Night Court
(32, W. S. Van Dyke) and
Love Is a Racket
(32, William Wellman), Raft was signed up by Paramount and gradually gelded from a hood to a Latinate leading man: thus he was in Mae West’s first film,
Night After Night
(32, Archie Mayo), and opposite Sylvia Sidney in
Pick-Up
(33, Marion Gering). He made
The Bowery
(33, Raoul Walsh) on loan to the new Twentieth Century and was then launched by Paramount as a tango-salon lizard:
Bolero
(34, Wesley Ruggles) and
Rumba
(35, Gering). He was tried as a bullfighter and then as a Chinaman in Alexander Hall’s
Limehouse Blues
(35), but his only appeal was in crime pictures:
Every Night at Eight
(35, Walsh) and
The Glass Key
(35, Frank Tuttle). Unhappy at Paramount, he was loaned out for
She Couldn’t Take It
(35, Tay Garnett) and
It Had to Happen
(36, Del Ruth), and he finished out his contract with
Souls at Sea
(37, Henry Hathaway);
You and Me
(38, Fritz Lang);
Spawn of the North
(38, Hathaway); and
The Lady’s from Kentucky
(38, Hall).

In retrospect, it seems remarkable that Warners then snapped him up. While there, he made
Each Dawn I Die
(39, William Keighley);
Invisible Stripes
(39, Lloyd Bacon);
They Drive by Night
(40, Walsh);
Manpower
(41, Walsh);
Background to Danger
(43, Walsh); as well as
The House Across the Bay
(40, Mayo) for Walter Wanger. But he refused
Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon
, and
High Sierra
—which suggests a more troubled personality than his films gave evidence of, or a more persuasive patronage of Bogart. Warners loaned him out for
Broadway
(42, William A. Seiter) and slipped him in 1943.

Thereafter, Raft appeared increasingly anxious in ever-stranger movies: after a few character parts—a lackluster Tony Angelo in
Nob Hill
(45, Hathaway)—he was asked only to imitate his former criminal self in cheap, spurious films. His legal problems also forced him further afield:
Nocturne
(46, Edwin L. Marin);
Johnny Allegro
(49, Ted Tetzlaff);
A Dangerous Profession
(49, Tetzlaff);
Red Light
(49, Del Ruth);
Nous Irons à Paris
(49);
Lucky Nick Cain
(51, Joseph Newman, who made
The George Raft Story); The Man from Cairo
(53, Ray Enright);
Black Widow
(54, Nunnally Johnson); and
A Bullet for Joey
(55, Lewis Allen)—these are the best of a bad bunch.

After 1955, however, he had bit parts—for Wilder, for Jerry Lewis, and in films that emerged from some of the most devious passages of the industry. As if Wilder’s demolition were not brutal enough, Raft was asked to play himself in
The Ladies’ Man
(61), only for Jerry to assure him that he couldn’t be George Raft and then lead him into the darkness in an elegant tango. It is a telling doubt, for the actor who went under the name always seemed a stooge compared with the figure talked about in the newspapers.